X-ray phase contrast simulation for grating-based interferometry using GATE

Abstract

The overall importance of x-ray phase contrast (XPC) imaging has grown substantially in the last decades, in particular with the recent advent of compact lab-based XPC systems. For optimizing the experimental XPC setup, as well as benchmarking and testing new acquisition and reconstruction techniques, Monte Carlo (MC) simulations are a valuable tool. GATE, an open source application layer on top of the Geant4 simulation software, is a versatile MC tool primarily intended for various types of medical imaging simulations. To our knowledge, however, there is no GATE-based academic simulation software available for XPC imaging. In this paper, we extend the GATE framework with new physics-based tools for accurate XPC simulations. Our approach combines Monte Carlo simulations in GATE for modelling the x-ray interactions in the sample with subsequent numerical wave propagation, starting from the GATE output.